Patience, Satire, and Self-Righteousness

Satire, always as sterile as it is shameful
and as impotent as it is insolent, [is the] homage which
mediocrity pays to genius. To disagree with three fourths
of the British public on all points is one of the first
elements of sanity. (Wilde)

ilbert and
Sullivan's fifth Savoy Opera,
Patience (1881), is a shining example of the critical
role of satire in popular
culture, and a most important record of how many
self-righteous upper middle class contemporaries viewed
fringe schools of thought and pop culture during the
dissipation of the Evangelical church.
The operetta's premise is that Reginald Bunthorne and
Archibald Grosvenor--characters reputedly based upon Oscar Wilde and
Charles
Swinburne respectively, although the actor who
originally played Bunthorne drew on Whistler--are
shams as bogus as the aesthetic movement
that they embody.

Bunthorne, after waxing sentimental about the joys of nice china and
lilies, and then reading a poem about the world's
shallowness which is replete with bathos, admits to the
innocent Patience that his demeanor is a ploy to lend
himself the appearance of intelligence, and to attract
women:

Am I alone, And unobserved? I am!
Then let me own I'm an aesthetic sham!
This air severe Is but a mere Veneer!
This cynic smile Is but a wile Of guile!
This costume chaste Is but good taste Misplaced!
Let me confess!
A languid love for lilies does not blight me!
Lank limbs and haggard cheeks do not delight me!
I do not care for dirty greens By any means.
I do not long for all one sees That's Japanese.
I am not fond of uttering platitudes In stained-glass
attitudes.
In short, my mediaevalism's affectation,
Born of a morbid love of admiration. [I.373]

The lyric continues in the mode of such nineteenth
century satirical peers of Gilbert's as Punch magazine and the
innumerable other writers, cartoonists, and magazines which
echoed a jealous, conservative response to the aesthetes.

Although the amusing subject matter of
Patience is hardly original--not only is it
derivative of humor magazines, but there had already been a
number of plays and light operas based on it--it is one of
the few instances of parody that aesthetes like Wilde and
Whistler enjoyed. Wilde purchased box seats for the opening
night--and found Gilbert and Sullivan's satire somewhat
amusing--although he had long refused to see a similar,
earlier production entitled The Colonel, which he
dismissed as "poor" when he did. Whistler was flattered
when his trademark white tuft of hair was adopted by a
member of the cast.

The aesthetes' uncharacteristically warm reception of the
operetta probably had to do with the popularity of its
author. Each of the Savoy Operas had rapidly
become in demand with the middle classes, and
Patience was no exception. The exposure it provided
the aesthetes had the paradoxical effect of widening their
popularity and, as Wilde biographer Richard Ellmann
observes, of both defining and prolonging the waning
popularity of the slightly nebulous movement. Considering
that it would be half a decade before Oscar Wilde would
begin to publish the works for which he
and the movement are most commonly remembered, it might be
too much to claim that Patience was soley responsible
for furthering the aesthetic movement. The aesthetes'
Golden Age was still to come, not only with the production
of Wilde's novel, plays, stories, but also with the art of
Aubrey
Beardsley, and Walter Pater's
best work. Marius
the Epicurean was not issued until 1885, and Appreciations
did not emerge until 1889. But it is uncontestable that
until Wilde and company brought about the aesthetes's second
wind, the light opera--performed nearly six hundred times
within a few years by D'Oyly Carte's company alone--held a
place in the national consciousness for a movement that Max Beerbohm said
was already dead in 1881. D'Oyly Carte--promoter of both
the Savoy Operas and Oscar Wilde's 1881 tour of the United
States--apparently used Wilde's speaking
tour to arouse American interest in an operetta that
Americans might otherwise have had trouble relating to, so
certainly there was a mutual interest in the success of both
endeavors.

It is also awfully likely that the aesthetes identified
with those librettos of William Gilbert which, in their
parody of Victoria's conservatives, solicitors, politicians,
and commissioned officers, mocked people who represented a
social class that Wilde and other dandies rebelled
against--namely, the middle classes. In Patience, as
if in expression of fairness, jealous soldiers are portrayed
in as ridiculous a light as Bunthorne and Grosvenor.

Equally importantly, the satire of Patience helped
to define precisely what the middle class consciousness
of Britain of the early 1880's was. Historian F.M.L.
Thompson points to the profound impact that the "evangelical
ideology" had on the people of Victorian Britain during the
middle of the century, suggesting that "its grip on the
language of public discourse on manners and morals became
very nearly total" and that " puritain disapproval resounded
from the press and pulpit (The Rise of Respectable Society,
259)." Curiously, Thompson points to the popularity of the
work of Gilbert and Sullivan to suggest that thirty years
later "the late Victorian middle classes had shed the husk
of earnestness and self-righteousness and embraced the
notion of fun (260)."

However, one finds it easier to believe that the
Protestant "self-righteousness" that Thompson describes was
merely transferred to a more general--a less specifically
"Protestant church"--container, in the sanctimonious
satirical entertainment of none other than the likes of
William Gilbert and William M.
Thackeray. As interest in formal religion declined,
ideas previously fuelled by Protestantism found shelter in
popular entertainment, for
assuredly, satire yields an abundance of self-righteousness.

Most significantly, the aesthetes were frequently
associated with the materially corpulent (from the middle
class satirist's point of view) Roman Catholic Church,
with its reliance on mystery, ritual and displays of
opulence. These elements of Christian service, of course,
and in daily conduct, Evangelicals were fundamentally
opposed to. Interestingly, Patience had at times
during composition been based on one of Gilbert's "Bab Ballads" (very
popular, early satirical pieces for Fun Humor Magazine)
named "The Rival Curates," which is about two meek priests.
The fluency with which Gilbert switched his libretto's
subject matter between Catholicism and the aesthetic
movement shows that both shared in the characteristics that
the middle class audience rejected. Specifically, the
aesthetes--many of whom were indeed attracted to the
Catholic faith--shared with the church a love of everything
the Protestants detested: a marriage of religion and beauty,
ceremony, mystery, and such. The officers of the Dragoon
Guards' shock, upon discovering that their lovers affections
have been diverted by the effeminate Bunthorne, radiates the
feelings of the part of the conservative middle class which
morbidly applauded--with an affected secular piety--Oscar
Wilde's incarceration for sodomy two decades later. The
military remained an important avenue of social advancement
for sons of the middle class. Tension between
Patience's soldiers and its aesthetes realized an
existing social strain between those who violated social
norm and those who represented middle class social order,
aspirations to aristocratic standing, and still-Protestant
morality. The middle class did not need religion to
preserve a rigid moral structure, for, increasingly, satire
that gossiped about social outsiders provided part of such
structure. A loosening grip on evangelical faith might have
made the upper middle classes more "fun," but its affection
for satire showed that it was certainly no less
self-righteous, and that a hardly definable class devoted to
ambition needed to find ways to characterize itself by what
it was not.

Is it possible, if many of those who had been the most
socially ambitious in the middle of the century were also
the most Evangelical, that many who were dedicated to
"getting on" in the latter part of the century were the most
addicted to the satire of Punch, Gilbert and
Sullivan, etc.? Indeed, it is from the upper middle classes
that these kinds of satirical entertainment drew a
following. What are other ways in which satire might have
substituted for Protestantism, in addition to voicing
popular moral judgments about who was acceptable and who was
not, or defining a class by its professed morals?